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So it has been awhile since I posted here, been busy working on 3 projects, one of which included one of the new “social media clauses” so it has kept me rather limited.I will post my thoughts on some of the new gear that is already shipping prior to NAB so that people can check them out at the show.

I use storage from a number of manufacturers and never have I ever opened a hard drive box and recieved this level of performance with the ease and simplicity of the LBD2. LaCie has delivered the fastest single device I have ever used with my laptop. Equipped with Intel’s Thunderbolt 2 Technology, this 1TB sleek black box, elegantly styled and compact for it’s 1.4 pound weight, offers users the single most powerful drive I have ever used.

The Thunderbolt 2 interface in conjunction with the raided dual SSD drives inside offer users up to an astonishing 1.3 Gigabytes of data throughput per second, easily making LaCie’s LBD2 the fastest single drive publicly available. While listed price at around $1300 USD for a 1 TB volume might be cringeworthy to some, when you have the need for speed this is the drive to have.

This shows the raw speed of LaCie’s Little Big Disk 2, here showing performance over 1 GB per second when paired with a 2nd Gen Retina MacBook Pro with Intel’s Thunderbolt 2 technology.

The cost vs. performance is nothing short of astronomical, because we are talking about moving Gigabytes per second with this beast. That performance, equal if not better at times than the internal flash memory found in Apple’s New Mac Pro, and is unheard of outside of a incredibly small number of Post facilities or in the massive server farms that allow ITunes, Amazon and Google to spit out information to you in realtime on the web.

However for desktop users, this is a first, when built my first 1GBps array for a client in 2007, at that time it required 2 computers just to control the 72 spinning disks and cost nearly $500,000 in time and materials when finished.

I can now walk into a store and buy nearly the same throughput off the shelf and have ready to work on in mere minutes after I am out the door.

LaCie’s Little Big Disk 2 has become my main carry around work volume, I recently used it during an extended trip, where it allowed me to cut 4K ProRes 4444 content on my laptop, well away from my office, without having to work with the associated hassles of the offline / online workflow that location editing of that much content would normally require.

Yesterday HP announced Thunderbolt across both their Mobile and Desktop Workstations lines, launching a truly innovative initiative in the PC world. No longer will PC users be relegated to running Windows on a Mac just to be able to use the power and speed of Thunderbolt, nor will they be limited to only a couple of DIY motherboards and the corresponding issues of drivers and compatibility just to be able to have the power that Thunderbolt brings to the table.

HP’s Jim Zafarana shown here with the new Zbook

In discussions with HP since NAB about the how and why of Thunderbolt and what it means for the industry,not just about projects working with Onset Data or the high end workflows that are the majority of projects that I work on, but that Thunderbolt also brings a host of other advantages beyond the simplicity of the connector.

Thunderbolt brings an unrivaled level of performance in a single cable, I know of no other protocol currently in use that can allow users the ability to move data in the same manner as Thunderbolt does. It is not just that, Thunderbolt can also extend the PCIe buss outside your laptop to allow users to easily access multiple kinds of media.

I have Thunderbolt adopters to eSata, Firewire, Ethernet adaptors already, but I can also access Video I/O devices from Aja, BlackmagicDesign and Matrox with SMPTE calibrated output all the way up to 4K and soon beyond. I can bridge my Thunderbolt connection to Fibre or GigE infrastructures for Enterprise users, even extend my performance with a RED Rocket or Io-Fusion for the ultimate in mobile performance.

I don’t care that it’s Xx times faster than USB, what I does impress me is that I can move data to one of my Promise Pegasus arrays at over 850MBps with the 1st Gen, 10Gbps version using a 6 drive array in Raid 6, it also means that the 2nd Gen, 20Gbps version announced by HP and Apple means that throughput on the next level could reach as fast as 1.6 GBps on a laptop.

1.6 GBps means playback of uncompressed 4K content, but it also means that we no longer have to suffer the data rates we accepted from Firewire 800 which transfers data at roughly 1 minute of transfer time per gigabyte of data. Time is money in modern production and post, no longer are data wranglers woefully waiting hours to move the content from a single days shoot.

Onstage with HP talking Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt has allowed me to be more productive in the ever tightening marketplace. I am consistently moving data at 4 to 5 times faster than my competition. I am currently working in a multi-cam production on a TV series shooting in Chicago, where I am transferring 32 GB Arri Alexa media in an average time of 7 minutes per card to 2 separate volumes in one of G-Technology’s latest offerings the G-Dock EV. The speed of transfer has totally changed the way I work.

HP’s Thunderbolt announcement will certainly shake up the marketplace. HP brings a level of authority and backs that with a universally recognizable name in the computing world. The fact that their products across the board will offer Thunderbolt connectivity is nothing short of evolutionary, no other manufacture will be shipping Workstation level laptops as well as a fully user customizable, Thunderbolt enabled Desktop Workstation that can move data at these heretofore unheard of rates on the consumer level. With the ability to share Thunderbolt enabled storage in the office or on location.

Whether you shoot larger numbers of photographs or video, work on a DSLR or in 6K on a RED camera, Thunderbolt offers you something you have not had previously, the power and performance only seen on extremely expensive, top of the line Workstations. The only difference now is that that level of performance is now available to professionals and consumers at a price that is nothing less than astonishing when you consider what that same throughput was just 5 years ago.

As a long time Mac user, many of you don’t realize that I have also simultaneously been a PC user for most of my career in Production and Post, originally it was out of necessity, but with the advent of better hardware and specific updates starting with Windows 7, I have been working more and more with the “darkside” as many Mac users see it. I do not.

A Love / Hate Relationship grew into Friendship

PC’s have been a part of my production life since the 1990’s when I got my first introduction to Vision Research’s Phantom line of cameras on a project. To control and setup the cameras I had to go and learn the Windows software, an update from the command line-ish version of MS-DOS most used at that time. Vision Research still requires the use of Window’s OS to control and maintain their camera systems.

Fast Forward to 2008, Apple’s desktop world was waining, with only incremental changes to the frame and architecture of the Aluminum “cheese grater” I started seeking out PC’s for specific client tasks. One of those tasks was to build a onset data handling station that would also allow for real-time backup of camera original materials to LTO tape in the dawn of the digital age. My cart started as a hybrid Mac and I used the Window XP system solely for the backup.

Slowly I started using the PC’s more and more for my needs when it came to customized solutions for onset production. To this day I have carried one of my Mac Laptops that is set for Dual Boot when needed.

I use PC’s regularly, I use them when I need the power and interchangeability that I cannot get in the current Apple Hardware and not in the future.

I am one of those people that need machines to do what I want them to do, not rely on others to decide. I need my machines to work for me, not just roll around on my cart as I move from location to location.

My desktop connections should not look like my laptop does

Hardware is hardware

To a person like me, I see no issues working on either platform, yet there is a reason why many of the higher end productions work on the PC platform. From CAD to Color Correction many of the tools I work with are only available on other platforms while the Adobe app’s I use the most right now run the same or better on my HP/ Nvidia workstations, the ones with an 8T -LSI solid state disc array, 2- Nvidia K5000 cards, a Kona 3G card, an Atto Fiber card and Atto10gE card and there is room left over inside for more if I need it.

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